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Tux Machines
Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 18, 2023
> I have mentioned several times in this blog, as well as by other communication means, that I am very happy with the laptop I bought (used) about a year and a half ago: an ARM-based Lenovo Yoga C630.
> Yes, I knew from the very beginning that using this laptop would pose a challenge to me in many ways, as full hardware support for ARM laptops are nowhere as easy as for plain boring x86 systems. But the advantages far outweigh the inconvenience (i.e. the hoops I had to jump through to handle video-out when I started teaching presentially, which are fortunately a thing of the past now).
> Anyway — This post is not about my laptop.
> Back in 2018, I was honored to be appointed as a member of the Debian Technical Committee. Of course, that meant (due to the very clear and clever point 6.2.7.1 of the Debian Constitution that my tenure in the Committee (as well as Niko Tyni’s) finished in January 1, 2023. We were invited to take part of a Jitsi call as a last meeting, as well as to welcome Matthew Garrett to the Committee.
> Of course, I arranged so I would be calling from my desktop system at work (for which I have an old, terrible webcam — but as long as I don’t need to control screen sharing too finely, mostly works). Out of eight people in the call, two had complete or quite crippling failures with their multimedia setup, and one had a frozen image (at least as far as I could tell).
> I bought myself a cheap wearable Bluetooth LE heart rate monitor in order to play with it, and this is a simple Python script to monitor it and plot data.
> [...]
> Things I learnt:
> Back in September last year I chose to back the StarFive VisionFive 2 on Kickstarter. I don’t have a particular use in mind for it, but I felt it was one of the first RISC-V systems that were relatively capable (mentally I have it as somewhere between a Raspberry Pi 3 + a Pi 4). In particular it’s a quad 1.5GHz 64-bit RISC-V core with 8G RAM, USB3, GigE ethernet and a single M.2 PCIe slot. More than ample as a personal machine for playing around with RISC-V and doing local builds. I ended up paying £67 for the Early Bird variant (dual GigE ethernet rather than 1 x 100Mb and 1 x GigE). A couple of weeks ago I got an email with a tracking number and last week it finally turned up.
> Being impatient the first thing I did was plug it into a monitor, connect up a keyboard, and power it on. Nothing except some flashing lights. Looking at the boot selector DIP switches suggested it was configured to boot from UART, so I flipped them to (what I thought was) the flash setting. It wasn’t - turns out the “ON” marking on the switches represents logic 0 and it was correctly setup when I got it. I went to read the documentation which talked about writing an image to a MicroSD card, but also had details of the UART connection. Wanting to make sure the device was at least doing something before I actually tried an OS on it I hooked up a USB/serial dongle and powered the board up again. Success! U-Boot appeared and I could interact with it.
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